1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to an actuator unit for a laminated ink jet recording head and a method of fabricating such an actuator unit. The actuator unit has piezoelectric vibration elements, expandable and contractible pressure generating chambers, ink flowing inlets, and ink jetting outlets, and is adapted to construct a recording head while being laminated on a flow path unit having common ink chambers and nozzle openings formed therein.
2. Description of the Related Art
For example, as disclosed in Unexamined Japanese Patent Publication No. Hei. 6-40035, an ink jet recording head, in which piezoelectric vibration elements are stuck to one region of a resilient plate that constitute pressure generating chambers and in which ink droplets are produced by changing the volume of each pressure generating chamber while causing the corresponding piezoelectric vibration element to be flexibly displaced, is designed to displace a wide area of the pressure generating chamber. Therefore, the ink droplets can be produced stably.
In order to improve the printing speed of such a recording head, attempts have been made to arrange a great number of nozzle openings per recording head. Since a head having a great number of nozzle openings has an extremely low yield, it is also designed to use a plurality of actuator units A, B, C and fix such actuator units in zigzag to a flow path unit D having nozzle openings and common ink chambers formed therein as shown in FIG. 11.
However, for a color printing recording head that requires at least three rows of nozzle openings, not only the width of the recording head is increased, but also ink jetting timing control becomes complicated since the positions of the nozzle openings that are driven to print an identical row of data are shifted in a carriage moving direction mutually.